Scouting for trash could be a daily deed

Thursday

Apr 11, 2013 at 9:21 AMApr 12, 2013 at 5:46 AM

I found a pair of pennies when I bent over to pick up a piece of garbage Saturday morning in a parking lot along South Duff Avenue. I took it as a sign that I should offer my two cents regarding the community's annual Stash the Trash Day.

I found a pair of pennies when I bent over to pick up a piece of garbage Saturday morning in a parking lot along South Duff Avenue. I took it as a sign that I should offer my two cents regarding the community’s annual Stash the Trash Day.

I’ve always appreciated the event, a legacy of former Tribune Editor Dave Kraemer, who initiated the inaugural cleanup day in 2001 with the aid of the Ames Morning Rotary Club. After all, what resident amongst us hasn’t at some time or another, particularly in the greening of spring, noticed the volumes of trash that accumulate in our road ways, water ways and green spaces and wished it wasn’t there?

That’s why the idea of a designated day-long community effort to shine the light on the litter problem and then to partially rid the city of some of its unseemly trash is sort of a no-brainer. Marshall together various community and university service organizations, clubs and religious groups, along with other interested residents and give the city a temporary aesthetic facelift.

It was part of the reason why more than a dozen members of Boy Scout Troop 196 could be seen scouring the South Duff Avenue corridor Saturday morning, picking up an assortment of debris that cluttered stretches of the mile-long thoroughfare from the U.S. Highway 30 interchange to Lincoln Way. Scouts are challenged with the idea of doing a good deed daily, and picking up litter certainly qualified for that distinction on this particular day.

It also turned out to be an eye-opener for some of the Scouts.

“There’s just so much of it,” one of them lamented. “I just wish people wouldn’t throw stuff out their windows.”

As I tried to explain to the earnest young man, trash gets into the environment via many avenues, some intentional, some not. As such, we all contribute to the problem and we all need to be part of the solution. After all, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a flotilla of trash and chemical sludge roughly the size of the state of Texas, isn’t expanding daily in the North Pacific Ocean as the result of nefarious indiscretions committed by a only a handful of miscreants, or even entire environmentally rogue countries for that matter.

My hope as I worked side by side this young man and the others was that they would not be overwhelmed by the scale of the problem, nor that they would blame others. Neither, I hoped, would they see what they were doing merely as a good deed for the day nor the fulfillment of community service hours required for various rank advancements. Instead, I hoped they’d see their work as another aspect of the character quality of personal responsibility they are actively developing while also expanding on their ethic of caring for the environment — not just on this day, but on the other 364 days of the year, as well.

Stash the Trash Day doesn’t have to happen just once a year in our city. It can happen every time we take a walk or a hike around our parks and neighborhoods. All that’s needed is a do-a-good-deed-daily attitude and a garbage bag or two.

Todd Burras can be reached at outdoorstoddburras@ gmail.com. Read his blog at www.amestrib.com.